A/N: Based on a tumblr prompt, like seemingly everything I do nowadays is. Another soulmate AU, this time one where your soulmate's last words are written on your skin. Enjoy.
Just like everyone else she knew, Christine didn't know who her soul mate was until it was too late.
When she was young, she had thought it was Raoul - after all, the last words she remembered him saying were "I love you", which almost matched the words written onto her throat in a messy scrawl. There was always a niggling sense of doubt about that, though. It was almost a relief when he met her again at the Opera; it meant he had one more chance to say the words correctly, when they truly parted for the last time.
When Erik had said the words in a pained, half-broken murmur, she felt a shiver crawl down her spine. It couldn't be…
But she ignored the feeling. She went on to marry Raoul, one week after the events underneath the Opera, and she managed to convince herself that she had forgotten about that shiver.
The facade was shattered when she read the announcement in the paper. "Erik is dead."
As she had promised, she returned to the Opera to identify his body and arrange for his burial. She brought with her the plain gold band he had given her, the one she had been wearing around her neck in an ironic echo of the way she had worn Raoul's engagement ring, and placed it on his left hand as she had promised she would.
She found his body outside of his lair. The cause of his death was obvious - his pale neck was ringed with bruises and a rope of catgut - his Punjab lasso. She looked away quickly, unable to bear the sight of the noose around his neck.
She tried to carry his body away, but she wasn't strong enough, so she had to drag it. She wasn't able to get it very far before she had to stop.
"I wonder if perhaps César is still around," she thought aloud. "I suspect he is, but I couldn't tell where he might be."
She looked back at the body for a moment and she choked up, her eyes flooding with tears. She stared at the ground in front of it, not daring to look directly at his dead face, more horrible in death than it was in life.
"It's not fair, what happened to you. No one deserves a life as horrible as yours. Poor Erik."
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted black marks on the corpse's right arm. She focused, and the marks resolved themselves into words.
Christine thought she had learned her lesson about sating her curiosity when it came to Erik, but apparently not, she thought as she pushed the corpse's sleeve up its arm to take a look at the mark.
A moment later, she dropped the corpse's arm and scrambled back, away from it. There, branded on Erik's arm in her own handwriting, were her last words to him: God give me courage to show you you are not alone.
She couldn't bear the sight of him - her soulmate (how? why?) - dead on the floor, having ended his own life. She ran away crying, back to Raoul, to a comfortable life as a Vicomtess. She spent her life with Raoul, a happy life, though she never loved him as deeply as she wished she could have.
She never returned to the lair below the Opera, never returned to fulfill her final promise to her poor Erik. On her deathbed, she almost found it funny, in a morbid sense. She had broken all her other promises to him; what was one more? She would join him in Hell in any case.